I smiled, placing it with the others, then went about getting myself ready for my day.
As I said, work was work. Wednesdays suck. I never found it comforting that half the week was over because it still meant you had half to go. Which was especially annoying when you had things you wanted to do with your weekend. Like spend it with your new... boyfriend.
Boyfriend.
That's what he was.
The term sounded absurd given that I was twenty-eight years old and Paine was in his mid-thirties, but that's what he was. He was mine.
So yeah, while when I was single, I often clocked sixty to eighty hour weeks happily and easily, I was struggling to pull off forty to fifty hour weeks with one.
I blamed the hormones.
And the mind-bending sex.
With a super hot, alpha, but in a sweet way, guy.
I left work and headed to the gym, planning on just putting in a good twenty minutes, just to keep things tight. Chinese food always made me feel greasy and bloated the next morning and, well, it wasn't easy to feel sexy when you were greasy and bloated.
I took a quick shower, dressed in plain jeans and my old college sweatshirt and headed out the door.
I did this while not looking up because I was searching for my keys.
As such, I ran into a solid wall of man.
"Oomph," I grunted on impact, my keys falling out of my hand as I took a hasty step back. "Hey sorry, I wasn't paying..." I looked up and froze.
He looked down and sneered.
Because we both recognized each other.
It was actually kind of hard to realize that it was only nine days before. It felt like a lifetime. But it was just the Monday before last that I found myself running through the streets of Navesink Bank being chased by a not-so-fit man named Trick who had at least half of a brain and a muscle-bound, brutish, single-celled organism named D.
Now, granted, I hadn't gotten the best look at either of them being that I was scared out of my skin and running for my life, but I'd caught a good enough look at D to recognize him as the man standing in front of me in black basketball shorts, black sneakers, and a too-tight gray wifebeater. Yeah, shorts and a wifebeater... in the middle of winter. I wondered if steroids somehow made your body temperature rise.
"Barbie," he smiled evilly.
In about point-three seconds, I took in the empty parking lot and knew the front doors were only about twenty feet behind me. There was a tree blocking it from view, but if I ran and screamed, there was a gym full of big, muscle-y guys who could run to my rescue.
I turned and had one leg out to start my sprint. But one hand clamped down around my mouth while the other arm curled around my belly so hard it felt like it was rearranging my insides, and lifted me up off my feet against his chest.
The panic started in a second, making my heart hammer in my chest, a sweat spread across my body, my throat start to feel constricted. I flailed as much as the position would allow as I was dragged backward. I needed to get my feet on the ground. I remembered a self-defense video I watched once where they grabbed a guy from behind and he said the only way to overpower a much stronger attacker from behind was to get your feet on the ground and jump as hard and fast as possible, thereby breaking his hold on you. Then you were supposed to run like hell. But my feet never hit the ground again as I was pulled across the lot.
We stopped beside an old tan sedan, as in old, like it had been alive almost as long as me. The next move happened so fast that I couldn't react. One second, a hand was still over my mouth and an arm around my middle, my entire body dangling. The next, my mouth was uncovered and my middle was released as my feet slammed down hard, the pain ricocheting up my thighs. But before I could even scream, a strong forearm was around my throat from behind, cutting off my air supply. My hands went up automatically, trying to claw his arm away to no avail as I felt my brain start to get fuzzy. I didn't know much about things like self-defense, but I did know it only took seconds to pass out while being choked. I was vaguely aware of D moving around behind me, of a trunk being opened.
But then, only a matter of five or six seconds later, I wasn't aware of anything as unconsciousness claimed me.
I woke up fully alert.
That hit me as strange. I figured I would wake up groggy, unfocused, a little unaware of what happened. But that wasn't what happened. One second, I was trying to claw a hand from my neck. Seemingly the next, I was rolling around in a trunk, acutely aware of what just happened to me. I was choked out and thrown in a trunk by a member of the Third Street gang.